Toronto Film Festival eyes theaters

In the past the Toronto International Film Festival helped to set up Hollywood’s awards season.

This year it may be more about solving the industry’s problems.

Set to begin on Sept. 4, the 33rd Toronto Film Festival has devoted some prime spots to movies that are not so much jockeying for position in the forthcoming Oscar race as fighting to be seen at all. Even with strong credentials, several featured pictures have been sideswiped by corporate consolidation, a weak market for independent films and producers’ wariness of an audience that has often shunned the difficult.

“Pride and Glory,” a New York City police drama that will be shown at an evening gala on Sept. 9, for instance, was shot more than two years ago by the director Gavin O’Connor (“Miracle”), with Colin Farrell and Edward Norton in lead roles. Warner Brothers, flush with films like this one after ingesting its corporate sibling New Line Cinema, is hoping Toronto will generate excitement for a much-delayed Oct. 24 release.

Another gala (on Sept. 10) celebrates “The Lucky Ones,” about returning Iraq veterans on a bittersweet road trip back home. Directed by Neil Burger, it stars Tim Robbins, Rachel McAdams and Michael Pena, who are expected to appear at the festival in support of a film finally set for release, on Sept. 26 by Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions. Confronted by Iraq-theme box-office disappointments like “Stop-Loss,” “Redacted” and “In the Valley of Elah,” the filmmakers and distributors have struggled for months to come up with the best way to market a movie in which the word “Iraq” is not mentioned though the war infuses every scene.

North American premieres are also set for two challenging films, Steven Soderbergh’s two-part “Che” (each part about two hours long) about Che Guevara; and “Synecdoche, New York,” a movie, directed by Charlie Kaufman, about a play within a city within a warehouse. Both screened at Cannes in May, without finding a distributor there. “Synedoche” is now set for release by Sony Pictures Classics; the producers of “Che” are finalizing a deal for U.S. distribution, their spokeswoman said.

“I think we’ve seen a re-doubling of effort on the part of filmmakers,” Cameron Bailey, a co-director of the festival, said in a telephone interview. He spoke of a sense that filmmakers are telling deeper and more personal stories, rather than chasing commercial prospects, which may be diminishing in any case.

Bailey said he believed the festival’s selections were among its strongest ever. He particularly noted two films, “The Wrestler,” by Darren Aronofsky, which has been looking for a U.S. distributor, and “Rachel Getting Married,” by Jonathan Demme, set for release by Sony Pictures Classics, as works by directors in peak form.

To avoid sprawl the 10-day festival has become smaller, despite a growing number of submissions, which reached 4,200 this year. The number of features was intentionally trimmed, to 249 from 261. But because last year’s festival included some unusually long works, officials expected to screen 20,693 minutes of film, down 30 percent from 29,764 minutes last year. In relatively short supply are the kind of big studio releases — “Michael Clayton,” “Walk the Line,” “Ray,” “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” — that in the past used Toronto to start Oscar campaigns.

Two films that may fit the mold this year are “Flash of Genius,” a Universal Pictures release, directed by Marc Abraham and starring Greg Kinnear as the engineer who invents the intermittent windshield wiper; and Spike Lee’s “Miracle at St. Anna,” a Touchstone Pictures film about a group of black soldiers in Italy during World War II.

Other principal attractions are Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Burn After Reading,” a comic caper from Focus Features, with George Clooney and Brad Pitt among its stars, and “The Secret Life of Bees,” from Fox Searchlight, adapted and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood from a Sue Monk Kidd novel.